The Heir Apparent

by Jane Ridley

  At Osborne the dead Queen’s body was prepared for her coffin. In accordance with the “Instructions” that Victoria had written in 1897 for her dresser to open directly after her death, Sir James Reid arranged Albert’s dressing gown beside her, together with a plaster cast of his hand and a long list of trinkets, photographs, and handkerchiefs. Victoria had lived for forty years in the borderlands between life and death and, like a barbarian queen (or perhaps a child), she desired to surround herself with keepsakes and mementos to take with her to the next world. Reid obeyed her instructions to the letter, keeping secret the orders that he knew would enrage her heir. At the last minute, he placed a favorite photograph of John Brown together with a case containing his hair in her left hand, which he concealed behind Alix’s flowers.6 On her finger was Albert’s wedding ring, and in accordance with her instructions, she also wore the plain gold ring that had belonged to John Brown’s mother, and which she had worn every day since his death.7

  No monarch had been buried for sixty-four years, and the precedents had been forgotten. The Duke of Norfolk as Earl Marshal claimed the hereditary right to organize the funeral, but when Fritz Ponsonby, assistant private secretary to Queen Victoria, arrived at the Earl Marshal’s office and spoke to the heralds, he found “absolute chaos.”8 Ponsonby took charge himself.

  “The Queen,” as Bertie called his mother’s coffin, left Osborne in the royal yacht Alberta. Bertie followed in the Victoria and Albert. He noticed that the yacht’s royal standard was at half-mast. The captain told him, “The Queen is dead, Sir.”

  “The King of England lives,” replied Bertie, and the standard was hoisted.9 The procession of great warships that glided behind the tiny Alberta across the gleaming blue Solent, booming their salutes, was, said Princess Mary, “one of the saddest finest things I have ever seen, a mixture of great splendour and great simplicity.”10 The cortège arrived at Victoria station at 8:00 a.m. on 2 February 1901. Wearing plumed helmet and cloak, Bertie rode for the last time beside his mother. The kaiser was by his side in the procession to Paddington. The crowds with their heads uncovered in deepest mourning were a sight “never to be forgotten,” he told Vicky.11

  From Paddington, the funeral procession traveled by train to Windsor. When the Queen’s coffin arrived, the horses drawing the gun carriage bolted, breaking the traces. Ponsonby hastily improvised, and the gun carriage was dragged up the steep hill by the men of the naval guard of honor.* In St. George’s Chapel, the Earl Marshal had forgotten to seat anyone in the choir, and Sir Spencer Ponsonby-Fane, the seventy-seven-year-old blind and bumbling comptroller to the Lord Chamberlain, shuffled about moving royals into the empty stalls. By some oversight, the King’s son-in-law the Duke of Fife had been left off the list of guests. Bertie loudly upbraided Fritz Ponsonby in front of Fife. Afterward he took Ponsonby by the arm and told him he had done wonders. “I had to say something strong, as Fife was so hurt,” he confided.12

  The accession of an overweight fifty-nine-year-old philanderer hardly thrilled the imagination. “We grovel before fat Edward—Edward the Caresser as he is privately named,” wrote Henry James, who thought the new King was “quite particularly vulgar!”13 Rudyard Kipling referred to him as a “corpulent voluptuary.” Even The Times could not resist a breath of criticism, causing a sensation with a triple negative: “We shall not pretend that there is nothing in his long career which those who respect and admire him could not wish otherwise.”14 The most that could be said for him, thought Wilfrid Blunt, was that “he has certain good qualities of amiability and of philistine tolerance of other people’s sins and vulgarities which endear him to rich and poor, to the Stock Exchange Jews, to the Turf Bookmakers and to the Man in the Street.”†15

  Few kings have come to the throne amid lower expectations. But Albert Edward turned out well. Like Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, the dissipated prince evolved into a model king.

  Bertie was a poor talker and worse letter writer. He was not witty and he was very easily bored. Yet he possessed charisma. Instantly recognizable in his curly brimmed top hat and frock coat or double-breasted suit, he combined warmth with dignity and a sense of occasion. People mocked his inability to pronounce his r’s, and some accused him of speaking with a guttural German accent. Others claimed that his diction was “perfectly modulated.”16 He had a deep, throaty smoker’s voice and he never used notes; he had perfected the art of the impromptu speech.

  The stories told about him stress his insistence on correctness and protocol. When the American Consuelo, Duchess of Marlborough, wore a diamond crescent in her hair instead of the regulation tiara at dinner, he remarked: “The Princess has taken the trouble to wear a tiara. Why have you not done so?”17 Fortunately, Consuelo possessed a tiara of her own, but the King could be merciless. To Fritz Ponsonby, who appeared dressed in a tail coat for a picture exhibition before lunch, he said: “I thought everyone must know that a short jacket is always worn with a silk hat at a private view in the morning.”18

  “My dear fellow,” he remarked to a groom-in-waiting accompanying him to a wedding, “where is your white waistcoat? Is it possible that you are thinking of going to a wedding in a black waistcoat?”19 He insisted that all the gentlemen of his household stayed up until he went to bed, which was usually between 1 and 1:30. Once he noticed that someone had slipped off, and he ordered the page to fetch him back. It turned out to be the seventy-five-year-old Sir Dighton Probyn, who was feeling unwell. Bertie roared with laughter, but Sir Dighton was not amused.‡20 Ladies were expected to kiss the King’s hand. The Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz observed, “He always pokes it out for that, too funny, but never embraces in return! Altogether this is quite a new fashion for ladies, to have to do so.”21 Not just ladies, either. The King ordered that his grandchildren, of whom he was very fond, kiss his hand before being kissed on the cheek, and address him as sir. Even the Prince of Wales kissed hands. These things really mattered to Bertie. Daisy Warwick noticed that he would turn from discussing European politics to consider the buttons and tabs on a regimental uniform “with a gravity that seemed quite out of proportion to the matter in hand.”22 Perhaps his obsession with correctness reflected a need to impose order and control on a chaotic world; but it chimed perfectly with fin de siècle imperial Britain, a society fixated on hierarchy and rank, which were dramatized through elaborately graded honors and decorations.

  “I regret the mystery and awe of the old court,” wrote Lord Esher.§23 Bertie was determined to sweep it away. The camarilla of women, headed by his sister Beatrice, who had dominated Victoria’s court, was purged. The royal palaces, shrouded and secret in his mother’s reign, were restored to their true glory and thrown open. The monarchy was based once more in London. Buckingham Palace, not occupied regularly for forty years, became the seat of the throne. All the old ceremonial was revived, reinvented, and made glamorous again.24

  At Windsor, wearing a pot hat and swinging a walking stick, Bertie clumped around the rooms with his dog at his heels, followed by Sir Arthur Ellis and Lord Esher. Queen Alexandra wished to live in the state apartments, but Bertie insisted on occupying Queen Victoria’s old rooms. “There was quite a smart difference of opinion,” wrote Esher, but the King had his way.25 Day after day he poked around the castle, installing electric light, moving furniture, rehanging pictures. “I don’t know much about A-rr-t but I think I know something about Arr-r-angement,” he growled.26

  His iconoclasm was more than a matter of taste. It was a posthumous revenge against his mother. Victoria’s mementos of Brown and Albert were ruthlessly swept aside. “Alas!” Alix told Vicky after a visit to Copenhagen, “during my absence Bertie has had all your Mother’s rooms dismantled and all her precious things removed.”27 At Windsor, Victoria’s Indian servants wandered like “uneasy spirits,” no longer “immobile and statuesque” as of old.28 On Bertie’s orders, a bonfire of the Queen’s letters to the Munshi was made at his home, Frogmore Cottage, solemnly watched by Alix, Beatrice,
and the Munshi himself.29 Soon the Munshi took his leave of the King and returned to India on a pension, shadowed by detectives who were worried that he had smuggled out compromising letters written by Victoria.30 Beatrice, Victoria’s widowed daughter, who had lived both at Buckingham Palace and Windsor, was politely advised to remove her furniture as soon as possible.31

  For the opening of his first Parliament on 14 February 1901, Bertie planned every detail. “I wished it to be in as grand State as possible,” he told Vicky.32 Victoria had last attended the opening of Parliament fifteen years before, in 1886, and on the seven occasions when she opened it after Albert’s death, she refused to appear in state.33 Now, for the first time in forty years, the monarch drove to Parliament in the old state coach. Drawn by eight cream horses, the tall glass coach towered above the crowd, lumbering and swaying on its leather springs. The House of Lords was packed as Bertie walked in procession, wearing a flowing crimson robe and the Imperial State Crown, unused since 1861. Alix, clasping his left hand, wore a black mourning dress and the Koh-i-noor diamond beneath her scarlet robes, and Queen Victoria’s small diamond crown with a flowing crepe veil.‖34 Both she and Bertie were “very alarmed & shy & emotionné,” but her regal appearance created a sensation.35

  With Alix at his side (“I … heard & felt my heart beating loud all the time we were seated on that very conspicuous place,” she wrote), Bertie read the speech himself—unlike Victoria, who had ceased reading it in person after 1861.36 Most novel of all, the King’s women friends were seated in the Ladies’ Gallery. There was speculation as to whether he would address them. During his speech he looked up twice, but managed to maintain his dignity.37 As The Times commented, the present generation had seen nothing comparable in splendor and solemnity, not even the Jubilees of 1887 or 1897.38 What they were witnessing was the reinvention of monarchy as spectacle.

  By projecting monarchy as tradition, Bertie was, in fact, modernizing and reforming it. He considered Victoria’s withdrawal and retreat into invisibility to be almost a dereliction of duty. The sovereign, in his view, must not just do the work, but be seen to do it. Bertie embraced state ceremonial with the expertise of a man whose experience of foreign courts, especially those of Germany and Russia, was unequalled. Not for nothing had he whiled away so many evenings on theatergoing. Historians have looked at the revival and invention of tradition and the pomp of the Jubilees of 1887 and 1897 and linked them to the resurgence of popularity for the Victorian monarchy.39 The brief but significant reign of Edward VII, however, has been underestimated. It was he who made sure that ceremonial was intentionally shifted to the top of the Crown’s agenda.

  Victoria had lived as a reclusive widow, retreating into the private, domestic sphere. As queen, she was both “powerful and powerless.”40 Her retirement from the public sphere dramatized her powerlessness, facilitating a transition to a monarchy with a merely symbolic role. Behind the scenes, however, the apparently powerless Victoria clung tenaciously to her political authority: She demanded to be kept informed, she debated policy, and she approved ministerial appointments. With regard to her private, family life, she pursued a policy of transparency. She issued Leaves from a Journal of Our Life in the Highlands, she authorized revealing biographies of Albert and her daughter Alice, she published photographs, and she chronicled her daily routine in the Court and Social column of The Times. This created an illusion of intimacy that played into the narrative of the widow Queen.a

  Bertie’s program with respect to the private sphere was the opposite of his mother’s. This most visible of monarchs was extraordinarily secretive about his private life. Less is known about his family than that of any other recent sovereign.41 Victoria and Albert’s invention of the “royal family” as being constantly on show—an idea that was revived later in the twentieth century—was quietly dropped.

  The difference in style can be seen from the diaries kept by mother and son. Queen Victoria’s journal is among the great documents of the nineteenth century—confessional, self-examining, and often devastating in its candor, sweeping judgments, and violent emotions. Bertie’s diary, which he wrote each night before dinner, consists mainly of appointments and lists: names of guests and racehorses, times of trains, numbers of birds shot.42 Often he refers to himself formally in the third person, as The King. There are no feelings, no reflections, no opinions. It is dry, even repellent, to read, but the diary is a remarkable document of kingship, mapping a life spent largely in the public eye.

  “Will he sell his horses and scatter his Jews or will Reuben Sassoon be enshrined among the crown jewels and other regalia? Will he become desperately serious?” Winston Churchill asked his mother, Jennie. “Will he continue to be friendly to you? Will the Keppel be appointed 1st Lady of the Bedchamber?”43

  The new King made it plain from the start that he had no intention of dropping his lady friends. When Emma Bourke wrote a letter of condolence on the Queen’s death, Bertie cabled in reply: “Much touched by your kind and sympathetic letter; shall never forget any of my old friends.”44 He continued to shower Emma with notes, and still addressed her as ma chère amie or “My dearest little friend,” but “My Dear Mrs. Bourke” appears more often, and he signs himself ER instead of the old AE.

  For the first year of the reign of Edward VII, mourning for Queen Victoria imposed a ban on society. “Racing has no interest for me this year,” Bertie told Emma Bourke, and his horses were leased to the Duke of Devonshire.45 But within two months of his mother’s death, he had resumed his habit of dining out in London. Dining out was something that Queen Victoria had never done; but the King “has been making a good many small ‘Mrs. George’ [Keppel] dinners lately,” wrote Carrington.46

  Every effort was made to keep the King’s relationship with Mrs. Keppel out of the newspapers. In May, he was on board Sir Thomas Lipton’s yacht Shamrock with her when the masts snapped and all the canvas fell over the side. For a moment it looked as though no one would escape alive. The accident was reported in the press; but instead of Mrs. Keppel, the name of Lady Londonderry was printed, and she allowed it to stand uncontradicted.47

  Not all of Prince Hal’s old companions were allowed to come to court, however. The person who played Falstaff to Bertie’s Henry V was Daisy Warwick.

  Daisy’s relationship with Joe Laycock was spinning into melodrama. When Laycock became involved with a younger woman, Kitty, the Marchioness of Downshire, Daisy lost all sense of proportion, stealing Kitty’s love letters to Joe and sending them to Kitty’s husband, Lord Downshire, who sued for divorce and was granted a decree nisi. Now that Kitty was free, Laycock felt that he was honor bound to marry her. Daisy, made frantic by the unintended consequences of her action, became pregnant once more. When Laycock responded with indifference, she had the pregnancy aborted. The operation was botched, and she nearly died of septicemia.48

  Alix wrote Daisy a “very kind” letter asking her to avoid the King.49 There was a real risk that she would drag Bertie once again into the divorce courts. Daisy also received a visit from Lord Esher. “He told me, with charming courtesy and frankness, that he thought it would be well for all concerned if my close association with great affairs were to cease, as it was giving rise to hostile comment which distressed Queen Alexandra.”50 Daisy blamed her dismissal on her socialist ideas. In fact, she was dropped because her scandalous behavior had become a liability.

  Alix flatly refused to be known as Queen Consort, and insisted on being styled Queen.51 Bertie demanded that she be treated with full dignity. Within a month of his accession, he made her a Lady of the Order of the Garter, and when the herald raised objections about placing her banner in St. George’s Chapel, alleging that women were not admitted to the order, the King curtly ordered him to do it.52

  Though he was generous with honors and titles, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Bertie marginalized Alix. She complained that he did not permit her to assume her position as Queen, as “he takes everything to himself, l
ets her do nothing in the way of carrying out her duties.”53 Even such things as giving Red Cross prizes, which Alix had done for years—the Red Cross was her particular charity—Bertie insisted on performing himself. He even took charge of the redecoration of the palaces.

  It had been sixty-four years since England had had a king, and no one could remember what the queen should do. “Aunt Alix,” wrote Princess Mary, “is quite ready to do what is right if only she is told, but just at present everyone is quite at sea.”54

  The seventy-nine-year-old Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, a granddaughter of George III who could recall the court of William IV and Queen Adelaide, was summoned from Germany to give advice. How “extraordinary” it was, she wrote, “that nobody knows anything more about the last Reign but one!”55 She observed that Bertie, who was every bit as jealous of his prerogatives as Victoria had been, blithely assumed court duties that belonged properly to the Queen. Alix had been told “to stand bye, mute & still, no presentations at the Drawing-room but to him; I told her Queen Adelaide had them presented all, she having to kiss Duchesses, Marchionesses (Countss [Countesses] I don’t know) with two kisses, then one kiss down to Earls daughters, after which giving her hand to be kissed, and the man kneeling on one knee.”56 When Bertie was informed that the Queen and not the King should kiss the young ladies, he objected strongly.57